New IEEE standards to ease virtual networking headaches

Cisco and Hewlett Packard are working to put together new Ethernet standards designed to ease the glaring weakness in the industry when it comes to handling virtual machines in the datacenter. Currently, virtual servers rely on the use of software virtual switches to intelligently route traffic emanating from or between virtual machines. This is necessary as the physical network interface cards (NIC) and Ethernet switches have no concept of the various relationships between virtual machines.

The draft IEEE 802.1Qbg and 802.1Qbh standards however, are designed to address the management issues resulting from the proliferation of virtualization.

One such feature proposed by the standards is called Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregation (VEPA), which allows physical end stations to work in tandem with an external switch in order to bridge between VMs and the external networks.

Jon Oltsik, an analyst at Enterprise Systems Group summed up the situation, "There needed to be a way to communicate between the hypervisor and the network."

Underscoring the importance of the new standards, the IEEE cited Gartner data asserting that 50 percent of "all data center workloads" will be virtualized as early as 2012.  Server and network administrators can expect an easier time once the new specifications are accepted and adopted widely.

For more on this story:
- check out the article at Computerworld 

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